It’s almost like we are trying to ruin customer service by ignoring obvious technology solutions. But part of the problem boils down to companies trying to adopt too many technologies without providing customers what they want: a real person solving a problem or providing guidance.

Customers may be turning to the Internet for answers and purchases, but this has left us without the ability to meet our customers face-to-face as often as we should. Live-chat exchanges are cold and it’s almost impossible to problem solve with 140-characters on Twitter. Ultimately these online options are harming our ability to connect with our customers in a meaningful way.

Actually knowing how a web-based customer wants to interact with a brand is challenging. To combat this vacuum of information, companies tend to provide every option to customers. This includes chat, email, social channels, and phone calls.

Engage.co is a company that brings you to your customer through video conferencing, chat, CRM integration, and email messaging. This service is not perfect. Plenty of clients still want to interact with your brand on social channels, and as of the writing of this piece, there is no technology that can seamlessly integrate all communication channels. Hopefully someday there will be.

“It is all about humanizing contact with companies ,” he says. “I felt like the pendulum has swung towards marketing automation and because of that we ended up dehumanizing our interactions. We are seeing asynchronous communication between the web-based customer and a company’s web presence. Web-based forms are a perfect example of this. We are accelerating the customer engagement process by deploying the company’s people in a process that allows instantaneous communication between the customer and the company representative.”

This is essentially bridging a gap between customer and rep. How do you bring the customer closer? Genuine engagement with the customer is a fantastic method for strengthening rapport, but current technologies have not provided an efficient way to do that. Especially for complex sales, the ability to clear the path of communication between your company and the customer will have a direct impact on sales. From clothing to automobiles, most consumer products could benefit from improving access to your company's service reps.

“Continuity in the relationship between your employee and the customer is another benefit. Currently, there is no methodology for customers to maintain a relationship with a company representative. This puts control back in the hands of the customer giving them the ability to reach back out to the person at the company who previously helped them.” Mr. Larson points out.

By maintaining a clear thread of communication, companies can go above and beyond with the quality of service. Everyone gets annoyed by constantly re-explaining a situation to each new rep during an escalation. As a unique solution, Engage.co is really about bringing humans back together again.

Mr. Larson adds, “Companies have been addressing the marketing automation problems. Now we are starting to hear talk about failed automation systems. This is where I cringe a little bit. If you are talking about building online interactive systems you should not be looking to AI at the expense of introducing the personality, the personal selling skills, and the passive or explicit knowledge of a sales or service person. The problem is this technology didn’t really exist. This is really a pre-CRM problem.”

Adding both the knowledge and personality of your brand to the process ties a nice bow on the quality of service you are able to provide. This gets to the root of the problem with current customer service models: customers are pushed into an automated system that leads to a CRM and too often people feel inconvenienced when either trying to buy a product or resolve an issue. These are the exact moments you do not want your customers to be hassled. Companies like Engage.co are working to solve the problem of authentic customer interaction. Engage.co is going to revolutionize online interactions between companies and customers.

The future challenge will be to connect all these communication channels into one seamless customer experience. A great first start is to create a mechanism on your website that allows your customers to choose between chat options, messaging, or video and all within one platform that retains a succinct record of the customers transactions.

Jabez is embarking on a mission to change the lives of local high school students by opening the first tuition-free boarding high school with a self-funding model in California. He is formerly co-founder of two companies in the legal profession, a highly sought after speake...